jueves, 26 de diciembre de 2013

A tale of two rushes

There’s gold in them there wells

Dec 21st 2013
| WILLISTON, NORTH DAKOTA
| From the print edition

WHEN
his neighbour discovered gold in a Californian river in 1848, Sam
Brannan could have kept quiet about it. Instead, he filled a jar with
gold dust and rushed around the streets of San Francisco shouting “Gold!
Gold! Gold!” He had good reason to incite a gold rush: he owned a shop
nearby. He became California’s first millionaire by selling picks,
shovels, beans and bacon to the horde of prospectors who heeded his
call.

Gold fever spread fast. The lure of buried treasure “sucked nearly
every free hand and available arm to the gold mines”, observes H.W.
Brands in “The Age of Gold”, a brilliant history of the period. “They
tore themselves from warm hearths and good homes, promising to return;
they fled from cold hearts and bad debts, vowing never to return.” The Alta California,
a local paper, reported that “The whole country…resounds to the sordid
cry of gold! GOLD!! GOLD!!!” It added that this would be the last issue
for a while, since all its staff were heading for the gold fields.

America’s current shale-energy boom has plenty in common with the
gold rush, and might prove as momentous. It has created a gusher of
wealth in remote places. It has lured young men to wild frontier towns,
such as Williston, North Dakota. Jim Cramer, a television host, sounded
just like Brannan when he reported from North Dakota in 2011. “This new
black gold rush is just getting started!” he bellowed, against a
backdrop of nodding donkeys. “Listen, people in this country who need a
job, get up here!”

Unlike the Alta California, not all of The Economist’s
writers have headed for the frontier. But one correspondent, intrigued
by the parallels between the two booms, put on stout boots, packed a
copy of “The Age of Gold” and set off for Williston.

For the ’49ers—as the men who hurried west in that year became
known—the trek to California was arduous. “Mules old enough to travel
well were unavailable at any price,” writes Brands. Prospectors who made
their way overland went “at the pace of the slowest oxen [pulling their
wagons], no more than two miles [3.2km] per hour”. Many succumbed to
cholera, thirst or Indian arrows. One group, on escaping from the most
godforsaken tract of the Mojave desert, doffed their hats, turned back
and said: “Goodbye, Death Valley!” “The name stuck,” notes Brands.

The journey to North Dakota today is more straightforward. Still,
when your correspondent tried to reserve a rental car at Bismarck
airport, they were sold out. He eventually found a pickup truck. Driving
it through the Badlands was hairy: hundreds of huge oil lorries kept
thundering in the opposite direction along narrow country roads. The
pickup went much faster than an ox wagon, except in the traffic jam
outside Williston, which looked like a long, motionless steel snake
festooned with lights. A sign offered a cheerful welcome to “Boomtown,
USA”.

Men behaving badly

The communities formed by the two groups of migrants have some
striking similarities. For gold miners in California, life was almost as
rough as the journey west had been. San Francisco in the summer of 1849
looked like “the bivouac of an army on the move”, writes Brands; most
of the buildings “were actually tents”. The miners smelled awful. No one
“could be bothered to wash dirty underwear, only to wash gold”.

Workers in Williston today generally have it easier—though newcomers
sometimes sleep in their cars, which is not advisable in the winter,
when temperatures often drop below minus 20°C. Places to stay are scarce
and expensive. Many oil workers live in “man camps”, which look like
college dormitories that have been built in a hurry. The companies that
run them, such as Target Logistics of Texas, prefer the term “crew
camps” to man camps; it sounds less burly and tattooed. But who are they
kidding? When The Economist visited Tioga Lodge, one of Target’s camps, 99% of the 930 residents were male.

It is a bare-bones place for men who work long, sweaty hours to sleep
and eat. Happily the food is free and unlimited. The kitchens chop up
vast quantities of meat into portions just small enough to fit on a
plate. “They eat a lot,” says the chief cook, Jeff Ball, who used to
cater for troops in Afghanistan. Some workers heap their trays with meat
and potatoes in the dining room, then walk over to the cafeteria to
load up with burgers, hot dogs and pizza. Your correspondent, at the
salad bar, felt lonely.

Mr Ball gives the oilmen whatever they want. If they crave blackened
catfish and prawn gumbo like mom used to make in Louisiana, they can
have it. Likewise if a crew from Mexico wants tamales. The only thing
they can’t have—in the man camp, at least—is alcohol. Oil firms prefer
that dangerous machinery be handled by men with clear heads.

Too drunk to frack

Life in the gold fields was often violent. Miners drank and gambled
and fought. Thieves and ruffians preyed on the weak and unwary. Justice
was rough. Brannan, the shop-owner, led a committee of vigilantes. In
June 1851 his men caught a gangster stealing a safe. After a two-hour
“trial”, they hanged him from a beam in a public square.

Life in the gold fields was often violent. Miners drank and gambled and fought.

Williston, too, has developed a bareknuckle reputation. “The theft up
here is unbelievable,” says a private detective hired by an insurer to
investigate the disappearance of 15 truckloads of oil. “A lot of people
here are trying to get a piece of the action without working.” And, with
so few women in the neighbourhood, many men are frustrated.

“You put a bunch of guys together, working 12 hours a day, and
they’re going to get into fights,” shrugs Josh Wipf, a mechanic from
Montana who moved to Williston last year. Mr Wipf, who says the ratio of
men to women in Williston “sucks”, admits to having been in a bar fight
himself. “It was about a girl, I think. I don’t really remember. I was,
you know…” he trails off.

“They get rowdy when they get drunk,” says Alice Trottier, a student
at Williston State College. “I would never go out jogging alone at night
now,” she laments. Like many young females in Williston, she finds it
annoying to be stared at all the time. On the plus side, scarcity gives
women power. Men “treat you like a princess. They pay for everything,”
says Ms Trottier. On a good night waiting tables at a pizza joint she
can make $200.

In California during the gold rush, many men could only find female
company if they paid for it. Life for boomtown prostitutes was rough and
risky; some Chinese women, speaking no English, were in effect slaves
to their pimps. But others made a lot of money. “At a time when a Paris
streetwalker might make the equivalent of $2 a night, some of the
Frenchwomen in San Francisco made $400,” writes Brands. Belle Cora’s
brothel on Dupont Street was renowned for fine wine and music as well as
sex. “Men with lust in their hearts…and gold in their pockets beat a
path through the muddy streets to her door, where she made sure they
wiped their feet before entering.”

The same trade exists today in Williston, but with fewer chandeliers
and violins. Most paid hookups are probably arranged online: the oil
workers all have smartphones. Some practise the oldest profession the
old-fashioned way, but this can annoy bystanders. One of the staff at
Bubba’s Bubbles, a laundry shop, says she “had to kick out” a woman with
a pink wig who was accosting male customers in the parking lot.

Striking it lucky

The California gold rush was a low-tech affair. “No capital is
required to obtain this gold, as the labouring man wants nothing but his
pick, shovel and tin pan,” wrote William Sherman, later a civil-war
general, in a missive to President James Polk in 1848. It seemed to
offer ordinary people a chance to get rich quick: one man, sifting
through the dirt at the bottom of a stream, might conceivably find
enough gold to retire on. Not a good chance, mind: only a lucky few
prospectors struck the mother lode. The rest typically struggled to find
enough ore to cover their expenses; some died poor and sorry, or quit
panning to find a steadier job.

Fracking, by contrast, requires capital and expertise. Oil giants
such as Statoil and Schlumberger are flocking to North Dakota. They
bring pricey, high-tech equipment, from microseismic sensors to drilling
rigs that walk, like something out of “Star Wars”. From little frack
pads in the middle of vast wheat fields, they can drill four miles down,
more than a mile to the side, and, thanks to satellite technology, hit a
target three feet across. Then they shoot thousands of gallons of
water, sand and chemicals into the shale formation, creating hairline
fractures in the rock—hence the procedure’s proper name, “hydraulic
fracturing”. The sand stops those fractures from closing up when the
pressure is turned off.

But North Dakota rewards ordinary folk, too. The lure is not a
slender chance of becoming rich, but the near-certainty of finding a
blue-collar job that pays middle-class wages. A roughneck or truck
driver can easily make $100,000 a year. (Why did Mr Wipf make the trek
from Montana? “Good money.”) Anyone who can pass a drug test can find
work.

And just as the gold rush made shopkeepers and shovelmakers rich, so
the spoils of gas are widely spread. A whole economy has sprung up to
support the frackers. Someone has to build man camps, roads and schools.
North Dakota Developments, a property developer, is trucking ready-made
six-room housing units over from Minnesota and erecting them in what
used to be a cornfield. Rob Gavin, the boss, says demand is so strong
that he expects to recoup the development costs in a single year.

The place is growing so fast that, even at boomtown wages, finding
workers can be hard. Paul Coppinger, a boss at Weir-SPM, a firm that
makes oil and gas pumps, says that only a couple of his 63 staff in
Williston are native North Dakotans. The Walmart in town is the messiest
your correspondent has ever seen; there are too few hands to tidy the
shelves. Workers quit and take better jobs faster than you can say
“frack”.

Theron Amos, the manager of the local Pizza Hut, says he has lost a
fifth of his staff—in the past week. “I have 20. I need 30,” he sighs,
as he wrestles with the cash register and passes the shrieking phone to a
colleague. “Oh, man, I’ve got more grey hairs than when I started this
job.” Would Mr Amos turn any applicant away? “Well, one woman came in
and ordered a pitcher of beer before the job interview. I didn’t hire
her.”

Sitting on a gold mine

The locals in 19th-century California were not consulted about the
gold rush. Many Native Americans, who in previous decades had reached
accommodations with Spanish and Mexican settlers, were murdered or
infected with unfamiliar diseases. Scorched-earth offensives starved
them off their land: since hunting them down was too time-consuming, one
white soldier wrote, “It was therefore decided that the best policy was
to destroy their huts and stores, with a view of starving them out.”
Their descendants live in reservations. Williston’s natives are faring
rather better.

Because they can drill sideways, frackers can suck out the oil and
gas under a huge farm while disturbing only a tiny part of it. So the
farmer carries on rearing cows as before. The fracking takes place so
far underground that he never notices it. But he notices the royalties
that the energy firms pay.

“Most farms round here have mineral income,” says Tom Rolfstad of the
Williston Economic Development office. A farmer with two square miles
of land will get a signing bonus of $2.5m and nearly 20% of the gross
value of the oil and gas pumped from it, he estimates. A good well can
keep producing for 30 years and yield 500,000 barrels of oil. At $100 a
barrel, that’s $10m for the farmer. Even small landowners benefit. Mr
Rolfstad gets regular little cheques for the oil and gas extracted below
his modest home.

Many of the ancestors of today’s North Dakotans arrived at Ellis
Island in the 19th century. “If you were Norwegian, they’d send you to
North Dakota. If you didn’t speak English, they’d give you a card round
your neck asking people to help you find the right train,” explains Mr
Rolfstad. Under the Homestead Act of 1862, if the immigrants staked out
160 acres and farmed it for five years, they owned it—and their
descendants own the mineral rights. In Europe, where such rights
typically belong to the state, people resent the disruption fracking
might cause. Americans, by contrast, tend to be delighted if a firm
wants to frack under their land.

And for landowners, the fracking itself is not the only
money-spinner. A farmer with land near Williston will have no trouble
renting it out. The town is desperate for more offices, homes, shops and
hotels. In one small field your correspondent counted 50 mobile homes.

One occupant, Cindy Martin, says the farmer charges her $1,000 a
month to park there, with no electricity or water. “It’s a terrible
price,” she complains. But the boom means labour is scarce and wages are
high; Ms Martin makes twice as much as she would elsewhere, working at
Bubba’s Bubbles. She and her husband drove up 2,000 miles from Arizona.
She seems content: “We came here to work. We refuse to lay back and let
the government take care of us. We’re too American for that.”

For all their good fortune, some locals fret about the crowding,
pollution and change that accompany the new wealth. “It was a quiet,
small town,” laments Gary Daniel, a middle-aged Willistonian, as he eats
fried chicken at Gramma Sharon’s family restaurant. He has seen oil
booms before, “but not like this one.” People used to know each other in
Williston, he recalls: “Now everyone’s in a hurry to go nowhere.”
Prices have soared. Mr Daniel knows of old people whose rent quadrupled
so they had to leave their homes. “It’s flat-out greed,” he spits. The
schools are packed; their walls are “just bulging out”. The traffic is
“insane”. Overall, “whether it’s good or bad, I haven’t made my mind
up.”

Mr Rolfstad has fewer doubts. Growth is being carefully planned, he
says. “We decided to double the size of the town. Then we decided to
quadruple it.”

After the flood

The gold rush of 1848-55 not only transformed the lives of those who
found fortunes in the dirt (and those who failed to); it also changed
America. It rapidly populated the new territory of California, which
America had just seized from Mexico, and hastened the day that the
Golden State became a state. It led to the construction of railroads to
bind the settled eastern states to the Wild West. Its legacy includes
San Francisco and America’s thriving Chinese population (which exploded
during the gold rush, as boatloads of Chinese prospectors arrived).

Brands, the historian, goes further, arguing that gold transformed
the American dream. Whereas the Puritans dreamed of accumulating modest
fortunes “a little at a time, year by year”, through “sobriety, thrift
and steady toil”, the ‘49ers dreamed of “instant wealth, won in a
twinkling by audacity and good luck”. Among the early settlers, failure
“connoted weakness of will or defect of soul”. In the gold fields, by
contrast, “a person was expected to gamble, and to fail, and to gamble
again”. And “[w]here failure was so common, it lost its stigma.” This
idea—that failure is a socially acceptable stepping stone to success—is
one reason why American capitalism is so dynamic.

The fracking boom could be every bit as important as the gold rush.
It is about to turn America into the world’s largest oil and gas
producer, outstripping Russia and Saudi Arabia. It could add almost $700
billion to the economy by 2020 (about 4% of GDP), predicts McKinsey, a
consultancy. By then it will have created up to 1.7m jobs—far more than
the car industry provides. The sudden abundance of natural gas has
drastically reduced American energy bills while curbing greenhouse-gas
emissions, since gas is cleaner than coal.

The longer term effects of a boom are unpredictable. For instance,
the gold rush arguably led to the creation of Silicon Valley. It spurred
the laying of the railroads, making Leland Stanford rich. He founded
Stanford University, which trained the engineers who started the tech
firms, from Hewlett-Packard to Google, which made the Valley the envy of
the world.

In North Dakota fracking has poured money into schools. Some of those
Norwegian immigrants used to set aside a portion of their farmland
income to support the village school. That rule lives on, in places, and
the land now generates mineral royalties. No one expects to see a great
university emerge in the Great Plains just yet. But you never know. Who
in 1849 could have predicted that the empty hills around San Francisco
would one day sprout an Apple?

From the print edition: Christmas Specials

Original Link: http://www.economist.com/news/christmas-specials/21591748-theres-gold-them-there-wells?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/theresgoldinthemtherewalls

Nelson Mandela and the Bees

On a chilly Easter Saturday in 1998, I received an urgent message
from Nelson Mandela’s press aide to call a phone number in the Eastern
Cape. I was a reporter for a Sunday newspaper in Johannesburg at the
time, but was on vacation in Cape Town and had just stepped off a
wind-swept beach. So I was ill prepared for the conversation that
followed.

I called. A woman answered the phone and I gave my name. Soon, a
familiar voice boomed down the line. “I’m happy to hear from you,” said
President Nelson Mandela, as though a call from a reporter on a Saturday
afternoon was a pleasant surprise. But he wasn’t well, he said. The
reason for his indisposition was a swarm of honey bees that had attacked
him in his bathroom, while he was getting out of the bath.

The first democratic President of South Africa
said that he was particularly upset because he had defended the bees’
right to remain on the grounds of his rural home in Qunu, in the Eastern
Cape. “When the police wanted to remove them, I said, No, they are
perfectly entitled to select their own home,” he said. He also thought
the means of removing a hive—with smoke—was “a bit crude.”

But that morning, he’d stepped out of the tub and was about to put on
body lotion when he heard an aggressive buzzing outside the open
bathroom window. He had grown up in the countryside surrounding Qunu and
knew that, with snakes and bees, the best tactic is to keep still. But
the bees seemed intent on attacking, so he reached for a fumigator
spray.

“Then they launched a counterattack,” he said, stinging him in the
soft area just below the pit of his stomach, a favorite place for
attacking a boxer. “I had to flee.”

I asked a few questions, but I was so taken aback that I failed to
ask the big one: Why was he telling me this? He knew me as a reporter,
not as a confidante. His aides couldn’t or wouldn’t enlighten me, so I
called my editor from the beach parking lot and filed a story over the
phone. It ran the next day as a page-one anchor under the headline “STINGING ATTACK ON MANDELA HITS HIM BELOW THE BELT.”

It was picked up by the wire services and run around the world. At
least one newspaper felt at liberty to change his quotes. He had told me
that he was stung “four or five times in the stomach and in parts I am
too embarrassed to mention to a young lady.” That became “…and in other
parts that are privileged information.”

The story was deeply troubling for some. Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi,
who was in Mandela’s cabinet at the time, said that her mother-in-law
was concerned because the bees had stung him inside his house. A sangoma
(a traditional healer) told Sapa, a South African newswire service,
that this meant the ancestors were angry with him, and that his family
should slaughter a goat to appease them, and brew traditional beer.

“Why should the ancestors be angry with such a man?” I asked an aide.
“Because of Graça,” he said, meaning Graça Machel, Mandela’s then
fiancé. She was not even South African, let alone Xhosa, and there had
been some murmurings in Qunu about their relationship.
“There is a belief in Xhosa tradition that bees are connected to
ancestors, and if they show unkindness toward you it’s a message from
the ancestors,” Peter Mtuze told me years later. Mtuze is a professor
emeritus at Rhodes University in the Eastern Cape, a historian and an
expert on Xhosa culture. “Sometimes, it”—a bee attack—“just indicates
attention from the ancestor, if for some reason there is something you
need to do.”

At the time, I was ignorant of this dimension. When I interviewed
Mandela a few months after the bee incident, shortly before his
eightieth birthday, I asked him why he had told me, particularly given
that he had joked, soon after, that I had “exposed him to the world.”
Better the story got out the way it did, he said, than having a flutter
of gossip emanating from Qunu. He was kind enough not to say that he had
chosen a reporter whose ignorance would serve his purpose. My rendering
of the tale killed any deeper interpretation.

Mandela marked so many firsts in his brief five-year term as
President. One of them was the charming, though sophisticated and
tactical, way he dealt with the media. He got such good press not only
because of who he was but because of how he treated reporters. He once
fished a photographer from an Afrikaans newspaper out of a fountain on
the grounds of Tuynhuys, his Cape Town offices. The photographer had
been walking backward, taking pictures of him, when he tripped over a
ledge and fell into the water. (He was thereafter known among the local
cameramen as “the pool photographer.”) And he elevated the status of
journalists more than any other politician has done, before or since.

When the Namibian President, Sam Nujoma, came on his first state
visit to South Africa, in 1996, Mandela walked the surprised head of
state out of a press conference, through the Tuynhuys gardens to the
fence that borders Government Avenue, a tree-lined pedestrian
thoroughfare in Cape Town. Delighted schoolchildren stopped to shake his
hand through the railings. “Have you met the President of Namibia?” he
asked one solemnly. And to another: “What would you like to be when you
grow up? A doctor? Maybe even a news reporter?” He gestured at the reporters clustered around him.

There is an anthemic freedom song in Xhosa, Mandela’s mother tongue,
in praise of the statesman. It was sung when Mandela was imprisoned,
when he was freed in 1990, when he was President, and, afterward, in his
retirement. Nelson Mandela / Akekh’ ofananaye—“Nelson Mandela,
there is none other like him.” Today, for those of us fortunate enough
to have reported on him, it rings in our heads.

Pippa Green is a South African journalist and the
author of “Choice Not Fate,” a biography of Trevor Manuel, the first black finance minister appointed by Nelson Mandela.

domingo, 1 de diciembre de 2013

Must academics researching authoritarian regimes self-censor?

THE TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION28 November 2013

In the case of Rwanda, it is wrong to argue
that only academics working outside the country are capable of critical
comment, says Phil Clark

Source: Magnum

How
far should a journalist go to secure access to a violent or repressive
country? This question grabbed the attention of academics earlier this
year after the BBC used a group of London School of Economics students
to disguise a visit to North Korea to film undercover for a Panorama documentary.

The
broadcaster stood by its decision not to pull the programme, which
aired in April, but the LSE’s director, Craig Calhoun, warned that the
episode had put the institution’s staff and students at risk.

“The school works in politically sensitive and unstable countries,” Calhoun wrote on Times Higher Education’s website
at the time. “We study democracy and democratisation, social movements
and economic change, international politics and regional relations…We
study them, often, by physically visiting territories where suspicion of
foreigners asking questions runs high. That suspicion is heightened by
incidents such as this. In order to pursue our academic mission, our
students and our staff need to be able to move as freely as possible
about the world without facing stigmatisation.”

While the
objectives of journalists and academics can be very different, questions
about access – gaining it, maintaining it and whether, in some cases,
there may be too high a price to pay for it – are very familiar to
researchers studying countries that are subject to authoritarian rule or
where there has been recent mass conflict. Is access predicated on the
assumption that certain research topics or views are “off-limits”? Do
those granted access practise self-censorship?

Such issues are
regularly debated by academics specialising in the countries where
I conduct most of my research – Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic
Republic of Congo – but it is in the case of Rwanda that debate about
whether academics can combine fieldwork with criticism of national
authorities has been most intense.

Source: Getty

During
the past five years, some academics, including seasoned scholars, have
stopped travelling to Rwanda in particular because of fears for their
safety or that of their local respondents. This has coincided with a sea
change in international opinion of the country. After the 1994
genocide, Rwanda’s efforts to rebuild itself were lauded by foreign
journalists and policymakers, and it was often held up as a global model
of donor-assisted development and stability. In recent years, however,
it has been criticised for the violent suppression of opposition at home
and abroad, and because of the government’s support for various rebel
movements in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Debate about the viability of research in Rwanda came to a head after the publication in April 2011 of a collection of essays, Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights after Mass Violence,
edited by two respected scholars, Scott Straus and Lars Waldorf. The
book, which covered a wide range of political and social issues in
post-genocide Rwanda, was – for the most part – highly critical of the
authoritarian “social engineering” project undertaken by the ruling
party, the Rwandan Patriotic Front. It gave cursory attention to the
enormous strides the country has taken over the past 20 years in terms
of economic development, health, education, judicial reform, gender
equality and social cohesion. There was also surprisingly little debate
among the volume’s 29 contributors, which masked the fervent
disagreement among scholars on Rwanda more broadly.

Although
critical of the book, I was nonetheless shocked by the venomous reaction
to it by the Rwandan government and a range of national commentators.
An anonymous blog featured on the website of the Rwandan Embassy in
Washington DC, as well as a series of articles in the state-owned New Times
newspaper, accused the collection’s editors and various contributors of
being “vultures”, “genocide deniers” and “enemies of Rwanda”. It was
even falsely claimed that one contributor had secured a “fake” doctorate
and that the reason she wrote critically of the Rwandan judicial system
was because she had fallen in love with a genocide perpetrator who
lived in her backyard throughout her fieldwork.

In response,
Straus gave a number of interviews discussing the broader relevance of
this vitriolic reception. He told the African Studies Association that
the government’s reaction simply confirmed a central argument in the
book that “the government’s domestic and international strategy is to
silence critics”. The response by foreign researchers, Straus told The Chronicle of Higher Education,
is to “internalize the logic of intimidation, which means that many of
us self-censor. We say to ourselves, in effect, if I speak out I
jeopardize my access to the country and to my interlocutors…[which]
ultimately produces a skew in the published scholarship.” This was
particularly concerning, he said, because foreign academics and human
rights organisations are among the few sources capable of openly
criticising the Rwandan regime: “It is left to outsiders to make
critical comments if the domestic political space is largely closed.”

Source: Reuters

Local
researchers continue to use research to challenge policies. They may
not march down ­Kigali’s streets, but they are far from ineffectual

Straus’ views are widespread among researchers on Rwanda. Soon after the publication of Remaking Rwanda,
I attended a US State Department briefing at which the majority of the
20 assembled experts on the country said that they had not been there
for several years – some since the late 1990s – because they were either
officially personae non gratae or believed they would
personally be at risk if they returned. One well-known academic told the
meeting that it was not possible to conduct fieldwork in Rwanda unless
one toed the line on all aspects of government policy.

These
concerns are not without foundation. Working in a post-genocide society –
with its inevitable divisions, tensions and trauma – and in an
environment in which political and social interactions are sometimes
controlled presents researchers with substantial problems. But those who
claim that it is impossible to conduct field research on politically
sensitive topics in Rwanda without self-censoring and that only those
working outside the country are capable of critical comment about its
government overstate the case.

There is a tendency among some
foreign scholars and students to exaggerate the difficulties of
conducting research in post-atrocity environments. To claim that the
Rwandan government has placed a researcher under surveillance can add
enormous cachet to his or her work: it is assumed that it must be
sufficiently important and damning of state wrongdoing to warrant such
close attention. This gives some academics an interest in magnifying the
perils of their research.

On a Kigali hotel balcony several years
ago, I met an American PhD student whose thesis explored the role of
women in religious orders since the genocide. Given that the Roman
Catholic and Anglican churches in Rwanda are trying to reinvent
themselves after their institutional complicity in the violence – and
that the government has an extensive programme focused on women’s
empowerment – this struck me as an interesting although not particularly
controversial subject. The student leaned across the table and
whispered conspiratorially: “Ever since I got here, I’ve been followed
everywhere I go.” I gently asked who she thought was following her. With
great exasperation, she replied: “Well, the government of course.”
Given the nature of the research, this seemed very unlikely.

I
have had countless conversations of this self-aggrandising nature with
foreign academics, students and journalists. The most extreme version
involves the claim that a particular researcher has been blacklisted
from Rwanda because of the sensitivity of his or her work. Yet, with the
exception of a handful of senior academics such as Filip Reyntjens,
René Lemarchand and Gérard Prunier, who fell out with the Rwandan
government in the years immediately after the genocide, I know of no
foreign scholar or student who is officially persona non grata
in the country. While others claim to be blacklisted, none has to my
knowledge attempted to enter Rwanda and been turned back from its
borders. The reality is probably much less dramatic: they may have met
some resistance in securing government interviews or permits to
sensitive spaces such as prisons or military camps, or they may simply
imagine that things will be difficult when they next return to the
field.

Source: Getty

Claiming
that it is impossible to conduct research in Rwanda is also often about
protecting one’s patch. When I taught at the University of Oxford
several years ago, two of my master’s students returned from
a conference in the US to announce that they had decided against
conducting their dissertation fieldwork in Rwanda. When asked what had
brought about this change, they said that a prominent scholar had
advised them that no Rwandans would be brave enough to speak truthfully
about their research topic. I said that the academic in question had
recently published an article on the same subject, based on fieldwork
she had conducted the previous year, so it certainly seemed feasible to
research the topic in the country. Both students went to Rwanda,
gathered impressive empirical material and received distinctions for
their dissertations.

The claimed impossibility of researching
sensitive topics in Rwanda also overlooks the important ways in which
many academics succeed in voicing critical views on the country while
retaining access to their field subjects. Rwanda is not North Korea:
foreign researchers and journalists travel there freely and frequently,
including some of the contributors to Remaking Rwanda. Some are
more adept at maintaining access than others and the most effective
continue their research over many years. While recognising the
undeniable challenges of fieldwork, we should shift the rubric of
respect from those who claim that researching in Rwanda is too fraught
to those who continue to do complicated work on the ground.

From
my own experience and that of others who have conducted sustained
research in the country, the key is to be discreet, patient and
respectful in the field and to build close relationships with local
respondents, researchers and (where possible) government officials.
Difficult environments require difficult, and savvy, research. It is
possible to publish controversial findings and continue discussions with
officials, provided one adopts a fair and considered tone. In many
cases, researchers who have met closed doors in Rwanda have been
bombastic or hectoring during their research, belligerently “speaking
truth to power”. Such activist scholarship – which favours a certain
political agenda over exploring complexities and contradictions – tends
to make government officials in any country, not just Rwanda, defensive.
Some foreign researchers adopt an all-knowing attitude in developing
countries that they wouldn’t dare attempt at home and then wonder why
local officials don’t assist them.

Building relationships with
state actors and navigating officialdom often involves long and heated
discussions. But adopting a balanced research approach – highlighting
positives and negatives – and a respectful tone enables access and the
open debate of controversial issues. At two large government-run
conferences in Kigali last year – one to commemorate the 1994 genocide
and the other to mark the closure of the 10-year process of genocide
trials through the gacaca community courts – I gave presentations that
included discussion of the charged issue of crimes committed by the
Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front against Hutu civilians
immediately after the genocide. My comments included direct criticism of
ruling party behaviour at official events where government ministers
and other senior officials were present. Not unexpectedly, on both
occasions some expressed their severe displeasure with me verbally and
by email. However, after lengthy discussions, each one acknowledged that
I had no axe to grind and that my criticisms accompanied an analysis of
the many virtues of Rwanda’s approach to justice and reconciliation
since the genocide.

Source: Reuters

Similarly,
at the Kigali launch of my book on the gacaca courts in 2011, the
deputy chief justice (and now chief justice) of the Supreme Court, Sam
Rugege – an Oxford-educated professor of law – opened the event by
saying: “I have read this book and it contains much that I agree with
and much that I disagree with. It is important that we have this time to
discuss it, even if we disagree.” I had sent the book to Rugege a month
before the launch and we discussed it in person. These conversations
laid the groundwork for the open debates at the book launch, which
included some biting commentary from Rwandan academics and civil society
actors on aspects of my analysis and of government policy.

Certainly
Rwanda represents a tense, sensitive environment for local and foreign
researchers. But many of the former, who understand the domestic terrain
better than any foreigner, continue to use their research to challenge
existing policies. They may not wave banners and march down Kigali’s
streets, but they are far from cowed or ineffectual. Rather than being
viewed as such, many of them would benefit from collaborations with
foreign scholars and students, who possess crucial resources and access
to international networks.
The danger of overstating the risks of
researching in Rwanda is that it will discourage vital fieldwork and
instead produce a generation of armchair critics who prefer to denounce
Rwandan authoritarianism from afar but without deep empirical knowledge
of conditions there. This will lead only to self-satisfied activist
scholarship and uniform opinion, oblivious to the nuances and
complexities of life inside the country.

It is pleasing to note
that despite the doomsaying of some established academics, a new
generation is ignoring their elders’ advice and getting about the
challenging business of empirical research in Rwanda. In organising
a recent conference at Soas, University of London on the Rwandan
Patriotic Front, my colleague Jason Mosley and I received more than 60
abstracts, the majority from young academics who have recently conducted
field research in Rwanda and elsewhere in central Africa. This new wave
of researchers is proof that it is possible to be critical of the
Rwandan government and maintain access to the country. Some of them
contest the image of a despotic Rwanda in which citizens are merely
ciphers of the government, while others argue that the state is
authoritarian but, unlike many of their predecessors, support their
claims with deep empirical knowledge of the inner workings of the
government and its impact on the lives of everyday Rwandans.

Field
research in post-conflict or repressive societies is never going to be
easy. But it is possible, through respecting and building relationships
with local actors, to research in these environments and to be critical
of domestic trends. The outcome is a deeper understanding of complex
societies, which is vital for shaping international narratives and can
benefit local citizens.